Maybe you can now see a little
icon appear somehow associated with my Web pages in your Web browser
(Mozilla, for one, should
display it next to the URL in the location bar, and on
tab thumbnails): to the left is a slightly larger version of it.
Since Asa Dotzler
says he recommends
Web sites to have some favicon, I decided I might as well try. I
don't really like this thing, though: for one thing,
sixteen-by-sixteen pixels is too small for any useful image, and
besides I'm supposed to use some obscure Microsoft-invented image format
that apparently doesn't even support full alpha channels (only
all-or-nothing transparency, so I'm not putting any transparency,
because the alias effect would be awful). Not having any idea what I
could use as icon, I decided to take this Chinese ideogram (U+7121
in Unicode: 無; this is
actually the unsimplified, or Taiwanese, form), pronounced
“wu” in Mandarin Chinese and “mu” in Japanese,
which has an important association with Zen buddhism. It just means something
like “no” or “nothing”, which is probably
appropriate since I couldn't think of anything else to put up
there.